


Jounouchi is a Freeter

by Prix



Series: It's Always Sunny in Domino City [3]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series, Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Development, Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-13 22:00:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16480544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prix/pseuds/Prix
Summary: Jounouchi is making the hard choices, like whether or not to become his father.





	Jounouchi is a Freeter

**Author's Note:**

> Part 3 of a Series! See above. 
> 
> **Note:** As i have noted before, this is as much based on recollections and the Abridged Series as it is any direct contact with the original series in a long time. However, in my own recollections and memory refreshment, it was pointed out to me that in the manga, Jounouchi punched Kaiba at one point. However, in the anime, Kaiba catches his effort to punch him. For the purposes of this fic, figure that Jounouchi punched Kaiba one time and landed it.
> 
>  **Note 2:** Freeter (フリーター furītā) is a Japanese expression for people who lack full-time employment or are unemployed, excluding housewives and students. The term originally included young people who deliberately chose not to become salary-men, even though jobs were available at the time.
> 
> Freeters may also be described as underemployed. These people do not start a career after high school or university, but instead earn money from low-skilled and low-paid jobs.

So far, Jounouchi has done a lot better for himself than he figured he would after high school. He doesn’t have to wear a uniform every day, and he has managed to bring home a paycheck more weeks than not. It's tiring work, but it makes him feel competent, like there might be something he is good at in the real world. As much as he would like to break into playing Duel Monsters professionally, he knows that it’s going to take multiple lucky breaks to make that happen.

In the meantime, he has to find some way to make this life of his work. He knew he wasn’t going to do a great job on his exams; that ship had sailed a long time before he had become friends with Yugi and found any outlet for his anger or any particular reason to use his head. Whatever it is that Honda has in him that made him able to buckle down and get that done – well, that’s one kind of tenacity Jounouchi doesn’t have.

What he does have is another temporary job for a company that staffs a lot of the same kinds of gigs. He learns balance that even his weird, castle and blimp and middle of nowhere adventures with Yugi hadn’t prepared him for, climbing in and out of the back of big trucks supplying some of the many construction and remodeling sites around the city. Sometimes, he gets a few extra hours in, offloading huge crates of booze into some liquor store somewhere. He still lives with his alcoholic father, so those jobs aren’t his favorite and yet they make him feel right at home.

He hasn’t starved to death or made too big of an idiot of himself. A month passes, and while Anzu and Honda start their classes and are a little less available to hang out, Jounouchi keeps himself busy, too. His arms ache, deep in his wrists and down from his shoulders. He can feel muscles behind his shoulders and running up into his neck that he didn’t even know he had. His abdomen sometimes strains and makes him glad that there was at least a little something there to start with. He sleeps a lot and actually goes to bed on time. It’s weird, but he doesn’t dread it so much because waking up doesn’t mean attending a bunch of classes with tests that eventually end up telling him that he doesn’t know even what he does know.

He likes his coworkers sometimes, too. It feels like they know where he came from and that they’re a lot like him. Sure, he’s learned to do a lot of things to quell the anger he holds toward his father and to stay out of trouble, but by no fault of his own Yugi tends to be a little more in his own head. Jounouchi likes stretching his legs, his arms, his back, and for just forgetting everything but the steady, measured movement of his body for a while.

 

\- - -

 

_Jounouchi’s dad’s place, Domino City, Japan_

  


One night, in the middle of April, he comes home. He comes home after dark, but that hasn’t been anything all that unusual – not for a long time. It doesn’t do a thing to explain the loud slurring and the shattering glass that greet him against the doorframe. The pieces of a beer bottle clatter down in front of him before he can get his shoes off. There is a sudden, cool spatter that runs down one side of his shirt. It feels so violent and sudden that an instinctive part of him goes into fight-or-flight mode, a panicked feeling that it might be blood creeping in. The cool temperature reassures him that it isn’t blood, but he squints and scowls in the direction of his father anyway.

It doesn’t have to break skin to piss him off.

“Where th’ hell have y’ been?” his father asks.

Jounouchi doesn’t feel impressed upon to give him a straight answer. He looks around as he steps over the glass, shoes still on his feet, and looks for something to get the glass up with. He’ll do it, automatically, but every day it gets a little more absurd that he still has to.

“I don’t know which bothers me more. You wasting it or pouring it down your worthless throat,” he grumbles. His father bristles, visibly, from within the worn folds of his easy chair. Images from a television screen flicker against a sickly, sweaty pallor. If the place didn’t smell like beer before, it does now. He keeps moving, ignoring the fact that it seems like his father is looking around for a way to brace himself and come after him for his mouth.

It’s too late for that, though. Somewhere along the way, Jounouchi got too big and his father got too old and too out of shape for it to get that far.

Just around a tight corner in the kitchen, Jounouchi finds a broom and a dustpan with a long handle. He quickly sweeps up the pieces of glass and the beer that the broom bristles will catch and hurl into the container. His arms are tired, but one more job won’t break him. He gets as much as he can into the dustpan and hauls it to the largest trash can in the place – back to the kitchen – where he beats it against the side to make sure every drop of beer drips out along with some of the pent-up frustration that his father has awakened inside him for no good reason. Every bit as frustrated, he runs hot water down the drain of the sink and rinses the stench of beer out and gives the dustpan another couple quick hits against the side of it, too. Then he is getting a roll of paper towels and an actual towel and a bottle of lemon-scented cleaner to clean up the rest of the mess.

He knows how to do it. He’s done it before.

“I asked you a question,” his father reminds him after a fairly long delay.

“Yeah? Remind me,” Jounouchi says though he hasn’t forgotten and has no interest in answering.

“I said… where… th’ hell… y’been,” his father says as if slowing down will show some greater drunken mastery of his tongue. It doesn’t. It just makes Jounouchi have to listen to him for longer. “Don’t you have school or somethin’? Worthless… kid…” he says, turning his attention back toward the television as if he can somehow make the idea that it’s a rhetorical question a little more convincing.

“I’m done,” Jounouchi announces when he has gotten as much of the beer cleared away as he can. He hopes there aren’t little shards of glass by the door that are going to jam themselves up into the soles of his feet. For now, though, he just carries the sodden towels off to the laundry basket and tosses them in with disgust. “I’m done,” he repeats, and he isn’t sure if he is reminding his father that he’s _done_ with school or just trying to convince himself that, one way or another, he’s _done_ with him again.

If only it were that simple.

He doesn’t stop once he puts some distance between them. He heads to the bathroom door.

“I’m going to shower,” he announces, and it feels like more information and concession than the drunk version of his father – which is the most-often seen version of his father – really deserves. “You should try it once I’m through,” he calls as he slams the door behind himself.

That makes him feel just a little better.

When he finally gets in bed that night, it takes him a while to go to sleep. His eyelids are heavy, but they stay open. He stares up at the ceiling and occasionally glances over to the window of his tight, cluttered bedroom. The ambient light from outside seems to keep him awake though he’s had no trouble ignoring it most of his life.

His father is a good-for-nothing, lazy alcoholic who has given up on anything he used to be. Jounouchi wondered about it a lot more when he was younger, but lately the thought has come back to mind. What did his dad want to be before he started losing himself in a bottle? What the hell had left him keep his mom as long as he did? Was there anything behind all stale bullshit?

Jounouchi hates his father. Only, sometimes, he can’t hate his father. It isn’t that easy. Besides, without a bigger income, he’s not going anywhere – at least, not anywhere fast.

 

\- - -

 

_The Izakaya_

 

The way he finds out where Honda works is an overtime shift taking a shipment of alcohol and vegetables to the back entrance of a local izakaya. He hauls the second or third box load into the back and sets it down where the boss had indicated when he hears his own name.

“Jounouchi?”

He starts a little when he recognizes the voice but can’t quite calibrate himself to accept that someone he knows so well is _here_. He manages not to drop the crate and turns around to meet dark eyes that are as familiar as anyone’s.

“Honda?” he asks, just as incredulously but with a little note of doubt creeping in towards the end. “What are you doing here?”

He looks at the apron tied to the front of Honda’s clothes and notices that he’s standing there in the back like he belongs there. He knows the answer before Honda answers. He just wonders why he didn’t know the answer before. He isn’t sure why, but he feels a little afraid when Honda responds.

“I work here.”

Jounouchi frowns and nods at once.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I… figured,” he admits. “So… how long have ya been working here? I thought you were going to school and stuff,” he replies, holding whatever it is at bay.

“... ‘And stuff,’” Honda echoes, gesturing around him.

“Oh, right, so you’re still going and everything,” Jounouchi explains to himself.

Honda nods. Jounouchi feels out of place.

“... Yeah, I’m… still workin’ too. Look, I’ll catch you later,” he says. He reaches up and claps Honda on the shoulder and leaves out the way he came, climbing back up into the passenger’s seat of the truck, waiting for his free half-ride home.

He isn’t sure why it bothers him. He wonders why he didn’t know from the moment Honda got a job. He tries to put it behind him and decides it must have just been an easy oversight. Honda has been really busy. They’ve all been. He resolves that he’ll drop by and see Honda one day. No harm, no foul.

 

\- - -

 

_A hot, rainy week at the beginning of summer_

 

Jounouchi had managed to keep it together for a couple of months – maybe three. He’d been proud of himself. Then, as it usually happened, upon reflection, it took just about a week for everything to go to shit.

The first thing that happened was that he awakened one morning to a tight, burning sensation in the back of his throat, up along the roof of his mouth. It almost itched. It annoyed him. When he went to take a shower, it didn’t clear away at once no matter how much he tried to gargle hot water as he brushed his teeth (also in the shower.) His arms felt heavy when he went to his loading job that day, but he made it through. Another day’s pay secured on a day when he didn’t know how soon each day was going to matter so much to him.

Two more days later, he knew he was sick. It was temporary – a bad cold or something. He’d had worse, and he’d get over it. The problem was, even though it was temporary, it felt like it would last forever. His nose ran like a faucet, clear snot getting to his upper lip over and over again. He wiped it away as often as he could, but even in the muggy, miserable weather that one broke right after one of the rainstorms, his face was getting chapped. Plus, sometimes he couldn’t have use of his hands if he wanted to keep moving.

On the fourth day, he wakes up and thinks he might feel a little bit better. Then he blinks a few times and frowns. His room seems brighter than usual. He fumbles for his phone and almost puts another crack in the screen when he sees what time it is. There are three different notifications about missed alarms and one text from his boss. It’s polite, but his heart stops.

He texts back with trembling thumbs – as polite, apologetic, and grammatically correct as he knows how to be. He promises he’ll be there. He gets himself as put together as he can with the fever still running a slow and steady course through his body. He finishes the work day. He almost dares to hope that he hasn’t ruined it.

Then, the next morning, he makes sure to get to the base site early. It’s then that his boss tells him that he’s noticed that he’s been feeling down lately. It would be hard not to with the constant sheen of mucous and the sneezing and coughing and clearing his throat and the sluggish pull against his movements. Jounouchi hates it. He barely hears it but nods anyway when his boss politely tells him that there will be other jobs. He can _reapply_ later.

He gets fired. And it might be as temporary as the job itself, but it feels like a punch to the stomach.

His father doesn’t give a dan when he walks back into the apartment before noon. He goes back to bed. He lies there face-down, only taking a breath when it’s absolutely necessary. He feels feverish and sick and tired and after a while, very quietly, the heat in his blood gives way to heat in his eyes and, just for a little while, very privately, he lets the tears go.

 

\- - -

 

 _The Izakaya_  

  


“Hey, Honda,” Jounouchi greets his friend as he takes the seat at the bar nearest to the place where Honda is wiping down the marbled surface to a clean shine. It doesn’t smell like it’s drenched in beer here despite the tingling presence of alcohol that seems to permeate the air. Jounouchi wonders. He looks Honda in the eye once he has his attention.

“What are you doing here?” Honda asks in a low, hushed tone.

“What? You ashamed of me?” he asks. He sniffs, but it’s because he’s still getting over his cold. He’s got himself pilled and washed and glued together as best he can. He doesn’t have a job, but he has money in his pocket. He pulls out a few bank notes to show to Honda. “Here,” he says. “Paying customer. That way it doesn’t matter if you’re ashamed of me,” he says.

“Jounouchi, that’s not what I mean,” Honda complains at him in a low tone that immediately makes him feel guilty. He wishes he didn’t feel guilty. “I mean… what’re you doing here?” he repeats in a different tone that is somehow supposed to make the meaning different. Jounouchi guesses that it does.

“I want you to do me a favor,” Jounouchi explains. He has rehearsed this part in his mind for a couple of days, knowing that if he thought about it too much in the moment, he’d have chickened out.

“... Yeah?” Honda asks him, and he feels another sag in his chest. More guilt. He knows from that tone that if he asks for almost anything, he’s got it.

“I want you to get me some sake. Or some whiskey. Or anything, really. Whatever it is guys drink when they’re here to do that,” Jounouchi says, managing most of it without too much improvisation. Then it’s out there, and he can’t take it back, and he keeps his mouth shut – pursed together even – as he watches Honda and waits for an answer.

“... Jou—” Honda starts to ask, but then he glances around and stops. He doesn’t want to draw too much attention to this apparently. Really, Jounouchi can’t blame him if he is ashamed of him. “Well, I’m not a bartender,” he offers as some kind of feeble excuse. It is an excuse that Jounouchi has anticipated and, just like he’d rehearsed in his mind, he rolls one shoulder in a weak shrug, like he doesn’t care whether it happens or not. For some reason, he does, but he has tried to brace himself, too, for the idea that if it doesn’t work out, maybe it is destiny or the universe or whatever greater force holds sway in more important people’s lives doing something for him for once.

“Eh, it’s–” he starts to say, but then Honda is gone, smooth-talking some girl who appears to be the bartender. She smiles and laughs easily and glances down in Jounouchi’s direction. He doesn’t quite know what to do with his overheated face that has more than one source of inflammation, so he gives her a weird wave that comes across more like a salute. He wonders if she likes Honda. In just a second, though, Honda is coming back with a glass prepared for him. He looks down at it and guesses that it’s sake. In truth, he’s almost tried _not_ to learn the various differences.

Anyway, in spite of all those lifelong precautions against this – against the substance itself, against becoming his father, against _actually_ thinking about giving up on himself – he gives Honda a cavalier grin and downs it. Honda watches him with raised eyebrows and widened eyes, the whites of them looking clearer than anything Jounouchi feels at the moment. He swallows and takes a breath.

“How was it?” Honda asks.

“Like you don’t know,” Jounouchi teases.

“I’m asking _you_ ,” Honda presses, and he sounds so genuinely concerned that Jounouchi smiles and takes a stab at a real answer.

“Not as bad as I thought it was gonna be,” he replies. He looks down at the emptied glass and feels it in his hand, turning it over a little – thoughtfully. “Can I have another one?” he asks, reminding Honda with an absentminded flick of his thumb of the bank notes on the table.

He does have more. Honda gives them to him, and he knows he gets past three and then he stops thinking about it so hard. He isn’t sure if he has one more, or if he has several more. He gets distracted. The first thing he notices as the tingling sensation settles into the muscles of his legs and then up his torso and all the way up to the tips of his ears is that he feels a kind of calm like _anything_ could happen and it wouldn’t bother him one bit. He doesn’t say much while he drinks. He tells Honda, at one point, that he’s been sick lately and that he’s read that alcohol can calm the coughing down. When Honda expresses concern about him going into work the following morning, Jounouchi waves him off reassuringly. He has the day off. He neglects to tell him that, as far as it stands right now, he might have the rest of his life off as far as he knows.

Eventually, he notices some of the faces of people along the bar. They aren’t people he knows. He looks back down at the bartender and notes that she’s pretty – dark ponytail on top of her head, dark complexion, bright smile. In a red, button-up shirt with quick, small hands, she’s just the kind of person who looks like she belongs there.

Jounouchi doesn’t know where he belongs.

He also knows that one of the next people who darkens the door of the izakaya doesn’t belong there, either.

Honda seems mercifully oblivious when he comes to check on Jounouchi after clearing the table just behind his seat at the bar.

“Please don’t sit here, please don’t…” Jounouchi finds himself praying to someone who most certainly doesn’t accept that form of credit.

Honda stares at him blankly and looks at the empty bar stools on either side of him.

“You shouldn’t be antisocial, Jounouchi,” he encourages him with a hand that briefly touches his back between his shoulder blades. Jounouchi is still feverish enough that the touch seems to tingle. He is drunk enough that it seems muted and far away, slow to register in his brain.

“I’m not,” Jounouchi promises. “Look, could you just make sure _they_ – you know, _he_ and whoever those old guys with him are – don’t sit there,” he says with a jerk of his thumb behind him at the freshly cleaned table.

Honda looks up along the bar and finally tunes in to what their conversation is actually about.

“Ohhh,” he intones. “... Well, like I said, I’m not a bartender _or_ a waiter here, really, but I could, maybe make sure Kaiba and his friends—”

“ _Shut up_ , you _moron_ ,” Jounouchi says with, maybe, a little less hesitation than he should have as he reaches over and tugs Honda’s shirttail. It isn’t vicious, but it’s damned insistent. He doesn’t want someone who isn’t his _friend_ to see him like this, and right now, there’s enough liquid truth running through his veins not to delude himself into thinking that some rich guy who has just so happened to help them for mutual benefit in several weird, hardly believable life-or-death situations is their friend now. Luckily, before Honda’s loud mouth can have any impact whatsoever, his bartender friend has some kind of _impact_ on the thin, middle-aged guy with a thick middle and some male-pattern baldness starting to happen who seems to be the man Kaiba is most interested in chatting with. He gives her a bashful smile, and they sit a long ways up the bar from Jounouchi. It is one of those rare moments when he feels pure, unadulterated relief through everything else.

“You don’t look so good, man,” Honda says. “I learned to hold my liquor a long time before you ever tried it,” he says kindly, like he doesn’t know that this _is_ Jounouchi’s first time giving in except for a tongue-test of the stuff once when he was ten. Maybe he doesn’t know. Jounouchi can’t remember. “Let me get you something to eat. If… If your money there doesn’t cover it, I’ll get the rest. Let me let the guy in the back feed you. One of the best cooks in the city,” he says.

“Fine,” Jounouchi murmures, reaching up and rubbing at his skull just above the inner edges of both his eyebrows.

“What?” Honda asks, as if he thinks Jounouchi might be offended by the suggestion.

“Fine,” Jounouchi repeats, but he puts a goofy, wobbly smile on his face and looks up at Honda and does something very controlled like a dizzy person’s nod. “Sure! I’d love to eat,” he says. He doesn’t know if it’s true or not, for once, but he knows that he probably _should_.

He sits there, slumped down on his elbows, holding his forehead and lightly rubbing it from time to time while Honda goes and gets him some food. Even if he isn’t a bartender _or_ a waiter, he sure comes through in a pinch. Jounouchi wishes that he was at least half as useful. He look up slightly and blows just a little at the freshly washed and dried light hair that hangs in his face. Then his nostrils fill with something that actually does manage to perk up his sloshy-stomached, sickly appetite.

He has some dinner. It seems like it takes a while, but sooner or later he is full, warm, sluggish. He feels content, but it is almost like if he moves that he might come in half, spilling guts and bile and delicious, recently chewed food all over the floor for all of the patrons that are still there.

Time stops seeming to mean much of anything. He feels Honda’s hand on his shoulder. He trusts Honda’s hand on his shoulder. He feels like he could just sleep here for the night. He leans more heavily on one of his triceps. His fingers thread into his hair like they’re what holds his head up. Honda tries to force him to drink some water. He reluctantly nurses it. Then, he hears a conversation worm its way into his ears. He doesn’t know if it’s because the ambient noise got lower of the voices got closer or if it’s just because he _knows_ those voices. Both of them. He hears it out against his will.

“Hey, sir. Mr. Kaiba… sir,” a familiar voice says. Jounouchi hopes that there’s some sarcasm behind it, otherwise it’s just humiliating.

He hears a gruff response. It doesn’t quite form into its constituent words in his head, but it’s him and not the voice.

“... I just saw you shaking your friend’s—”

“Business partner. Or potential business partner if you didn’t just scare him off at the _last_ possible moment.”

“... ‘Business partner.’ He seems like a nice guy!”

“What do you want?”

“It’s just that I saw you shaking your _business partner’s_ hand, and I didn’t know who else to turn to. It’s not like I can call his parents, and his sister doesn't need to see this. And I don’t know if she drives or has a transit pass or anything. I don’t get off for another two hours, and he’s…”

“He’s drunk,” the second voice decides with disdain.

“Yeah,” Honda says.

“Why is he drunk?”

“I wanted to be, you smug bastard,” Jounouchi announces as clearly as he can. He isn’t sure how clear that is. He feels himself being hauled to his feet. He isn’t sure whose hands are on him. He blinks and finds himself eye-to-eye with Seto Kaiba. “Great,” he remarks, giving Honda a somewhat wilting glance once he figures out where he is in his field of vision.

“I’m sorry, Jounouchi,” Honda says, quite seriously for Honda. “I think someone needs to help you get home, and I don’t get off for another two hours.”

“Get off,” Jounouchi repeats. “At least somebody wants you around, right? You and your perfect doin’ more than your job, better than your job…” he finds himself saying, and in spite of the plaintive tone in his voice, in spite of knowing that Honda would likely, in the long-term, forgive him for anything, he reluctantly hears himself and realizes that Honda is probably right. He gives Kaiba another look, and suddenly the offer seems a lot more attractive.

If being drunk makes him point out a person’s characteristics in the worst, most self-serving light there is, he would rather not be around anyone whose feelings he actually cares about.

After that, Jounouchi allows Kaiba to guide him out of the izakaya. This is done with a tight grip at the back of his shirt dead center of his shoulder blades. He gets steered like some kind of ventriloquist’s puppet, but at least he manages not to run into anybody. He manages not to be ungrateful.

 

\- - -

 

 _Outside the Izakaya_  

  


Suddenly, everything goes a lot faster once they’re past the step down onto the sidewalk outside the izakaya. Fast. Too fast. It takes him a second to realize that Kaiba has pushed him by the center of his back and that his feet are moving on their own like a friction-motor car trying to keep up its own momentum in vain. He is nearly bent over but manages not to fall when he rights himself and looks back at Kaiba.

“Gee, thanks,” he intones. Then, for good measure, he spits on the sidewalk in Kaiba’s general direction. “I’ll be on my way,” he says.

He starts walking in the general direction of what he assumes is home. After all, it was the direction he had been pushed. He’ll go his way, and Kaiba will go his, and this whole unpleasant encounter will be mercifully brief.

That’s what he thinks anyway before Kaiba opens his mouth.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says.

“... Excuse me?” Jounouchi asks, blinking at Kaiba. Coming from him, it invariably sounds like a threat.

“The way you are right now, you’ll wander into traffic, and honestly I don’t feel like seeing your face on the news.”

Jounouchi is, honestly, too drunk to argue with it.

It takes him a couple of blocks to start trying again. At one point, Kaiba’s coattail brushes just a little too close to his calf and it sets him off into trying to point out how stupid he’s realized it is.

“If you had just let me wander into traffic, you’d’ve seen my face on the news _once_ – maybe twice – and then I would’ve been out of your hair forever.”

“You’re not _in_ my hair,” Kaiba replies as if that’s the operative part of what he had been trying to say. It frustrates Jounouchi who isn’t sober enough to stop it from doing it.

“Out of your face, out of the place where you keep all the considerable pain that must be in your ass all the time to make you act the way you do. You know, gone.”

“Shut up, Jounouchi,” Kaiba cautions him curtly.

For some reason, Jounouchi notices that they are walking along beside a very shiny, glass-paned building that gives off a blue-cast reflection of the night-lights and sky of the city wherever he manages to half focus on it when he chooses not to shut up.

“Then you could go back to your stupid, permanently employed, rich-boy life, and I wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not I lost the only kind of job I could get ‘cause I was _sick_ and overslept one day and ‘cause it doesn’t even matter if I keep my stupid little job, ‘cause I’m replaceable just like every other guy who’s ever carried boxes in the history of—”

He was talking, and then he isn’t anymore.

Pain radiates from his cheekbone through every bone in his skull, rattling, making his brain feel like it might bounce just a little. He has stumbled back into the glass-paned wall behind him. He is looking at Kaiba and sees his fist, realizing what happened. He notices that Kaiba’s breath his a little heightened.

“What the—” he starts to ask, but he doesn’t get a chance. As soon as he starts to make a sound, that same fist makes an uppercut into his stomach. There is only one thing he can do in response. It isn’t even something he _does_ so much as something that happens to him. Suddenly, on the sidewalk in front of him, on the toe of one of Kaiba’s _shoes_ , there is a puddle. It is a puddle made of bile, acrid and sweet half-digested alcohol, and food. Perfectly good, partially digested food that Honda had scored for him. He’s sorry for that part. His eyes are wide. He looks up at Kaiba, ready to martial his strength and remind him _which one_ of them has generally done the punching.

Before he can formulate a response, though, Kaiba is talking.

“Good,” he says. It bewilders Jounouchi for a moment before he understands that Kaiba is talking about the vomit on the ground. Some of it one one of his expensive-ass boots. Jounouchi blinks at kaiba with something that feels disturbingly like _confused-clarity_ that doesn’t make any sense. He leans back against the glass pane, almost limp if upright and not in any way about to defend himself, let alone go on the offense.

“... Good?” he manages to question hoarsely.

“Now that you’ve got some of that poison out of your body, you might be sober sometime tonight,” Kaiba replies, exasperated and furious. Jounouchi doesn’t know what to do as Kaiba pries him away and leads him along – through the puddle of his own vomit, but maybe that’s fair play. He doesn’t know where they’re going. The buildings are too tall to be headed back to his place. He can’t think. All he knows is that he was, apparently, having a much different conversation with Kaiba than the one he’d thought they’d started out with.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Feedback and comments are longed for and appreciated. I'm pretty excited about this one. I plan to have at least a couple of subplots going, and this felt like the start to one of them.


End file.
